The Arestada (recommendations of the CÚG – the Committee for the Use of the Talossan language) of 2007 marked a seminal event in the history of our language. Ben Madison, Talossa’s founder and the language’s main driver, had left the community in 2005, and most other key players in the Talossan language world had either left Talossa entirely or were active in the Talossan Republic. Onto this stage and into the Committee came a set of new citizens with new energy and enthusiasm for the language and for seeing to the improvements that the Committee had long considered or tabled.

The Committee’s efforts and goals in that year were shared with users of the language (those in the Republic and who had left Talossa), but without full engagement among the groups of people, objections and concerns from both sides were sometimes misunderstood, and the Arestada was not embraced by some users of the language. This led many to worry that a permanent rift in the community was afoot, and that Talossan was diverging into two distinct dialects. While the differences between pre-Arestada and post-Arestada spellings were never so great as all that, the last thing anyone wanted was another division in a community that had in recent years been torn by them.

In the years since, with Madison’s final departure, we have seen the disparate Talossan communities coalesce once more into one, and the CÚG’s membership swelled with Reunision. The year 2012 was spent by the Committee working to ensure that the advocates of both spelling systems (pre- and post-Arestada) understood one another, and compromises were sought that would promote universal acceptance of any remaining known differences, which were hopefully to be limited to style, rather than meaning.

The “Reunision Arestada” of 2012 has not yet been released (yes, it’s 2014; we know) so it is perhaps not surprising that Talossans may not be fully aware of the compromises and agreements that were accomplished by the Committee toward that end. While there are still a few disagreements on semantics, a great majority of the issues separating the advocates of both systems were eliminated.

In our next few Snerts, we may explore some of the other successes of the Aresteda, and what remains to be done.